I'd like to announce a new project, "Fomus." Fomus is a music notation
tool in Lisp for computer music composers that converts "raw" musical
data into an output file or files suitable for loading into several
different notation programs. The purpose is to provide a better
alternative to current options for importing data and formatting it into
a score. The program tries to automate a variety of tasks including
note spellings, distribution of notes across voices and staves, clef
signatures, ottava brackets, combining notes and rests in multiple-voice
parts, and (maybe one of the more useful functions) quantizing note
offsets and durations by finding combinations of tuplets/beat divisions
that minimize the amount of error. Support also exists for articulation
markings including slurs, other markings like text and dynamics, and
some special types of notation like tremolos, harmonics (some of these
aren't implemented yet). It can also be used as a Common Music backend,
and will use some of CM's functionality if present.
Fomus is still in its initial testing/development stage so many bugs
exist, some minor things aren't implemented yet (including backends--it
only outputs LilyPond files at the moment), the documentation needs to
be finished, the interface needs to be simplified, etc.. This project
grew out of a smaller collection of Lisp functions I've been using over
the past few years to notate my own pieces. The main website is at
http://common-lisp.net/project/fomus/doc/ and contains instructions for
CVS download. At the moment the program should compile in the latest
versions of CMUCL and SBCL on Linux and CMUCL and OpenMCL in Darwin (it
won't compile in Darwin SBCL at the moment). Any comments, feature
requests and bug reports are welcome from anyone interested in using it
and seeing it develop--there is a mailing list link on the website.
(I apologize for the cross-posting.)
-David Psenicka
